James Jordan was a balding, middle-aged construction worker known to agents as a “floater,” a “hustler.” Jordan had moved to Gulfport to get a job, but the FBI tracked him there in mid-October. He soon learned that agents knew all about his role in the killings. A fellow Klansman had told them. Jordan said nothing at first, but five subsequent interrogations got tougher. “I’m going to see your ass in jail,” an agent told Jordan. Offered $3,500 and federal protection, Jordan finally told all he knew. And the FBI, after spending more than $800,000, after interviewing a thousand locals and nearly five hundred Klansmen, finally learned the darkest details from the first night of Freedom Summer.
The sun was setting but the June evening was holding hot and humid when word went out from the Neshoba County jail—“Goatee” was in custody. Klansman Edgar Ray Killen hurried to the Longhorn Drive-in on the edge of Meridian to gather a lynch mob. “Killen said they had three civil rights workers in jail in Philadelphia and that they needed ‘their asses tore up,’ ” Jordan told the FBI. The job had to be done in a hurry because the men, held on a minor charge, would soon be released. One man hurried to a pay phone. Others hopped in a car to gather Klansmen who did not have phones. Killen, a short, scrawny man known as “The Preacher” because he occasionally spoke from local pulpits, said they would need gloves. At a Klansman’s grocery store, the men got six pairs, brown cotton. A Klansman’s trailer park became the rendezvous point. The men would meet there, then head for the jail. Everyone should bring guns.
It was not every day a klavern carried out an extermination order, and as volunteers settled in for their first night in Mississippi, more than a dozen Klansmen converged on the silent streets of Philadelphia. The killers were a random lot—the preacher, assorted truck drivers and contractors, Neshoba County’s former sheriff, cops young and old—but all shared their Imperial Wizard’s fanatical resolve to get “Goatee” and repel “the nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi.”
At 9:00 p.m., three cars and a pickup parked outside the courthouse. One man entered the jail and returned with the news: “Goatee,” some other white man, and a nigger were still behind bars. Killen led his crew to a dark street within sight of the jail, then had the group drop him at a funeral home as an alibi. The men came back downtown and waited until a fat old cop came up. The three were gone, he said, headed south on Route 19. Three cars set out in pursuit. They were soon joined by Deputy Cecil Price in his patrol car, chasing the fleeing station wagon over roller-coaster hills, faster and faster. All the cars were roaring at a hundred miles per hour when James Chaney finally decided to pull over. No one ever found out why.
Price ordered the men out of their car and into his. Strobe-lit by his red light, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney piled into the backseat. Blinding headlights from behind told them that this time they would not get off with a speeding ticket. One Klansman drove the station wagon, following Price and other cars back toward Philadelphia.
Roads in Neshoba County do not merge; they cut away from the highway, plunging into forest and thickets. Price abruptly turned onto a narrow slash of gravel known as Rock Cut Road. Passing two houses, the cars headed through cut clay banks surrounded by woods. Jordan waited on the highway, then drove up Rock Cut Road. Approaching, he heard muffled voices. Engines stopped. Car doors slammed. Then came “a volley of shots.”
The bodies were tossed into the station wagon. “Everyone follow me,” one man said. “We’ll go the back way.” The convoy of cars drove to the dam where the men got out and stood in the warm night, smoking, talking. “Someone go and get the operator,” one finally said. Twenty minutes later, the murder party heard the grinding of a bulldozer. “They will be under twenty feet of dirt before it is all over,” one man said. Someone asked about the station wagon, and when the bulldozer fell silent, several men went to a garage on Route 19, where the owner of the dam site filled a glass jar with enough gasoline to burn it. After swearing each other to silence, the men went home. Mississippi had been redeemed again. “Goatee” and his friends would never be found. Everyone would soon forget them.
Seeking evidence, FBI agents had not asked James Jordan the questions a parent or a wife might have. When had Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney realized they were in the hands of killers? As the chase accelerated, had Goodman remembered what he had told a friend—“I’m scared, but I’m going” ? Did Schwerner recall the threats—“That Jewboy is dead!” Did Chaney remember his mother asking, “Ain’t you afraid? ” What had the three said to each other as they rode in the back of the police car? What had they thought when they felt the car lurch off the highway and onto the gravel?
A few weeks after James Jordan signed his confession, another informant filled in final details. Auto parts salesman Horace Doyle Barnette remembered Preacher Killen saying, “We have a place to bury them, and a man to run the dozer to cover them up.” He described Cecil Price clubbing James Chaney with his blackjack, and sketched a grisly murder scene complete with final words. James Jordan, it seemed, had not heard shots in the distance. He had ridden “shotgun” with Deputy Price while the three sat in the back. The car had skidded to a stop along Rock Cut Road. Racing up and opening the rear door, Wayne Roberts, a man so volatile he had been dishonorably discharged from the marines, had yanked Schwerner out and spun him around.
“Are you that nigger lover? ” Roberts shouted.
“Sir,” Schwerner replied, “I know just how you feel.”
Roberts, his left hand gripping Schwerner’s shoulder, put a bullet through his chest. Schwerner fell facedown in the ditch. Seconds later, Roberts yanked out Goodman and, without a word, killed him with a single shot. Just then, Jordan got out of the car, saying, “Save one for me!” Jordan dragged out James Chaney, who scrambled to get away. Three shots gunned Chaney down. “You didn’t leave me anything but a nigger,” Jordan said, “but at least I killed me a nigger.” Back in Philadelphia, the killers met with Sheriff Rainey.
“I’ll kill anyone who talks,” Rainey told them, “even if it’s my own brother.”
On December 4, 1964, Christmas decorations adorned the streets of Philadelphia when, beneath gloomy skies, sixty FBI agents fanned out across Neshoba County with arrest warrants. The accused, including truck drivers, farmers, cops, and the owner of the burial site, were taken from cafés, farm-houses, and trailers. Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price, their boots caked in red clay, returned from a raid on a moonshine still to find agents waiting at the courthouse. Rainey asked to see the warrant. Both men handed over guns and badges. Like others arrested that morning, both carried startling amounts of cash—Price, $403; Rainey, more than $1,100. By afternoon, nineteen men sat in the Meridian courthouse, talking amiably. In front sat Sheriff Rainey, legs crossed, enormous chaw in his cheek, dipping tobacco from a pouch labeled “RED MAN.” Someone cracked a joke. Price smiled, Rainey guffawed and a Life photographer snapped a famous photo that came to symbolize the southern redneck—smirking at the charge of murder, or even a “civil rights violation.” Six days later, Rainey’s arrogance was rewarded.
At a preliminary hearing on December 10, Meridian’s federal commissioner, a schoolmarmish woman, ruled the latest Klan confession “hearsay”—and dismissed all charges. Shaking hands, slapping each other on the back, all nineteen men went free. “Ol’ Rainey could be elected governor now,” a man outside the courthouse said. The Justice Department filed new charges on New Year’s Day.
Throughout 1965, Mississippi was torn between law and custom, past and present. In Neshoba County, Sheriff Rainey and his plump deputy were more popular than ever. Cecil Price was talking about running for sheriff when his boss’s term expired. Locals doubted the two lawmen or anyone else would ever be convicted. Elsewhere, Klansmen met in open rallies drawing hundreds. Crosses still blazed at night. COFO’s office in Laurel was burned to the ground, and its offices elsewhere had electricity cut off, windows shot out. Yet shame was finally bringing moderates out of hiding.
Years later
, writer Willie Morris remembered “a feeling that we hit the bottom of the barrel with these three murders in 1964.” Following Freedom Summer, investment in Mississippi plummeted. Tourism on the Gulf Coast was cut in half. “I favor dropping an atom bomb on the state of Mississippi,” an Ohio man wrote Time after the Neshoba indictments were dismissed. “I am ashamed that such a savage state exists in the country.” America’s disgust was summed up by Phil Ochs’s ballad, written after his week in Mississippi and debuted to stomps and cheers in a Greenwich Village nightclub.
Here’s to the state of Mississippi,
For underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines,
If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find.
The fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes,
And the calendar is lying when it reads the present time.
Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be a part of.
Faced with economic reprisals and nationwide scorn, a critical mass in Mississippi realized they had no choice but to topple what one Jackson lawyer called “that wall of Never.”
After more than a dozen bombings, McComb had finally fought back against the Klan. In November 1964, sensing that the life of their community was at stake, embattled citizens pooled $5,000 in rewards for information about bombings. Business and civic leaders formed Citizens for Progress, calling for “equal treatment under the law for all citizens regardless of race, creed, position, or wealth.” And on November 18, FBI agents and highway patrolmen watched as a black man was served a bowl of gumbo in a restaurant on Main Street. “The waitress smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ ” noted C. C. Bryant, who had welcomed Bob Moses in 1961. “She even asked us to come back.” A few hours later, blacks desegregated McComb’s Holiday Inn, Woolworth’s, Palace Theater, bus station, and Continental Motel.
In the year following Freedom Summer, similar harbingers of an edgy change surfaced across the state. Forced by federal lawsuits, schools in Jackson, Biloxi, Clarksdale, and Leake County desegregated first-grade classes. In response, all-white private schools, known as “seg academies,” began to spring up wherever integration seemed near. Many had long waiting lists. Two blacks enrolled at Ole Miss, but no one rioted. Early in 1965, the Mississippi Economic Council called for full compliance with the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Paul Johnson praised the position. But good intentions mouthed in Jackson had never meant much in the Piney Woods or the Delta. Full democracy would come to Mississippi only by federal law, or the threat of intervention. As another long hot summer loomed, as Congress inched closer to passing LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Governor Johnson urged the state legislature to concede the inevitable by removing barriers to black registration. During the debate, cops arrested more than a thousand marchers, herding them into pens at the state fairgrounds. But in the end, the legislature complied. The Jim Crow relics—poll taxes and literacy tests—were finally put to rest. And to everyone’s surprise, voters approved the change in a statewide referendum.
In July 1965, four summers after Bob Moses came to Liberty, Mississippi, the town had its first Freedom Day. SNCC staff had organized for months in preparation, and by 9:00 a.m., the line to register stretched from the courthouse—where Moses had been beaten—all the way to the sidewalk. The sheriff approached. “Okay, who’s first?” he asked. A shriveled farmer stepped forth and said softly, “Me.” Twenty-two people filled out forms that day in Liberty. All twenty-two passed the test. Within a month, two hundred more were registered, including the widow and oldest son of Herbert Lee.
The following month, a further challenge to Mississippi’s old order came to a head on Capitol Hill. Shut out of the 1964 election, when Mississippi gave Barry Goldwater 87 percent of its vote, Freedom Democrats had quickly filed a formal challenge in Congress. Mississippi’s all-white congressional delegation was not duly elected, the challenge claimed, because blacks had been systematically disenfranchised. When the challenge was introduced on the floor of the House, 149 congressmen supported it, not enough to win but enough to shake the assurance of Mississippi. Congress then gave Freedom Democrats time to gather affidavits proving voter discrimination. William Kunstler put out a nationwide call for lawyers and more than a hundred came to Jackson. Depositions describing voter fraud, beatings, and shootings were taken throughout Mississippi. Rita Schwerner returned to roam the state getting affidavits notarized. Federal hearings in Jackson stunned commissioners who listened as blacks told of terror inflicted on them just for registering to vote.
By the end of summer, Kunstler’s team had assembled more than ten thousand pages of testimony. As he prepared to submit his evidence, Kunstler saw “a lawyer’s dream case. Almost everyone in the United States conceded that Negroes could not vote in Mississippi.” On September 17, 1965, the challenge was finally heard before a congressional gallery packed with Freedom Democrats. Nearly five hundred had come to Washington, D.C., to hold a silent, all-night vigil outside the Capitol. On the morning of the debate, Freedom Songs broke out. Then dozens of sharecroppers and maids, barbers and cooks filed into the House chamber where three MFDP candidates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine, were seated below them, the first black women ever allowed on the House floor. But when the challenge was finally heard, southern congressmen argued that if Mississippi’s delegation was unseated, “every congressman from the Potomac to El Paso can expect the same.” After two hours of debate the vote was finally taken. One hundred and forty-three congressmen supported the challenge, 228 opposed it. Speaking to the crowd gathered outside the Capitol, Fannie Lou Hamer broke into tears. “I’m not crying for myself,” she said. “I’m crying for America.”
Yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is, and we are proud of what we have become.
—Myrlie Evers Williams
Epilogue
On a sunny October morning in 1967, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price waved to crowds of supporters as they strode toward the granite courthouse in Meridian. Wearing suits and fedoras instead of cowboy hats and police uniforms, both men looked more like salesmen than “the law.” Rainey still had a chaw in his cheek but horn-rimmed glasses made him seem less the caricature of a southern sheriff. Price, who had lost his recent run to succeed Rainey, smiled softly at rows of clicking cameras. Both men, along with the sixteen others about to be tried with them, seemed in high spirits, confident that no jury of their peers would convict them. In the thirty-three months it had taken to bring the Neshoba murder case to trial, Price and Rainey had toured the South. Appearing before cheering Klansmen, the two lawmen had become symbols of the dying Civil War revanchism the Klan was still dragging through the dirt. Now, as they reached the courthouse door, a cheer went up across the street. A Confederate flag had been hoisted.
The ensuing years had seen violence in Mississippi wax and wane. Yet whenever white rage exploded, it strengthened the Mississippi movement and hastened the future. One dark night in January 1966, the gentle Hattiesburg farmer Vernon Dahmer, whom volunteers remembered for his Fourth of July picnic during Freedom Summer, was brutally murdered. When Klansmen threw flaming jugs of gasoline into Dahmer’s home, Hattiesburg’s local hero stood in the blaze, firing back at his assailants, allowing his wife and children to escape. Consumed by fire and bullets, Dahmer died the next day. Yet as a signal of how things were changing, Mississippi style, Governor Johnson denounced “these vicious and morally bankrupt criminals,” and within months, the FBI charged fifteen men with Dahmer’s murder. Among the accused was the soft-spoken businessman who had issued the order to get “Goatee,” Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers.
The following June, James Meredith returned to Mississippi vowing to march from Memphis to Jackson to encourage voter registration. Meredith was just inside the Mississippi border on his one-man “March Against Fear” when he was ambushed by shotgun. His wounds were superficial but the outrage drew civil rights leaders fr
om across the country. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and others came to Mississippi to continue Meredith’s march, steering it through the heart of the Delta, drawing thousands who walked, sang, and registered.
In October 1966, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the Neshoba murder case, the defense came up with another twist. The grand jury, it seemed, had been all white. Again the case was postponed until a new grand jury could hand down more indictments. This time the list included the Klan’s gentlemanly, homicidal Imperial Wizard. By then, Mississippi was deeply divided on the case that had brought it national shame. The state still refused to press murder charges, yet many hoped justice would come in federal court. Just as many, however, continued to see the defendants as heroes standing up for the sovereignty of their embattled state. Even as the FBI sent more undercover agents to infiltrate the Klan, Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price attended fund-raising dinners among hundreds eager to back a desperate defense of Jim Crow. By the time their trial on “civil rights violations” finally began, after three years of preparation, appeals, and dismissals, it was remarkably short.
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